The Nokia Lumia 810 on T-Mobile may be less flashy and good looking than the HTC 8X, but it carries some serious appeal beyond its lower price tag. The Windows Phone 8 smartphone launched at $150 with contract, but is already down to $99 on the T-Mobile US website. The blocky black rectangle won't win prizes for looks or lightness but it does offer a removable battery, a microSD card slot and Nokia's strong Maps and navigation solution with free spoken directions.

The Lumia 810 is a close relative to the Nokia Lumia 822 on Verizon and the 820 on AT&T. It has a 4.3" ClearBlack AMOLED display running at a not very impressive 800 x 480 resolution. The display's colors, black levels and touch sensitivity are however impressive, and like the flagship Lumia 920 on AT&T, it works with gloves and fingernails.

Like all Windows 8 launch phones, it runs on a capable 1.5GHz dual core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 CPU with a gig of RAM. It has just 8 gigs of storage, but you can use a microSD card to store your music, videos and documents. It feels very fast, as Windows phones generally do, and it benchmarks similarly to the Lumia 920, HTC 8X and Lumia 822. The UI is super-quick and video playback and gaming are flawless.

The Lumia 810 has dual band WiFi 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1 +EDR, NFC and a GPS with Glonass. It's a GSM world phone with HSPA+ 3G (T-Mobile and AT&T both refer to HSPA+ as 4G, but don't confuse it with the even faster LTE). Voice quality is very good, as we've come to expect from a Nokia phone, and the speakerphone is adequate.